Storytelling and Artivism in Current Migration Narratives. Reshaping and Expanding the Anglophone Postcolonial Literary Canon

This paper assesses the efficacy of artivism in Warsan Shire's poetry and in the Gatwick Detainees Welfare Group's digital narrations 28 Tales for 28 Days (2018). The last decades have witnessed the proliferation of new literary trends and genres which highlight the enduring issues of racism, identity, belonging, and alienation. Enabled by global culture, telecommunication technologies, and the new media, heterogeneous multifaceted literary production engenders narratives that are simultaneously accessible and available to a wider audience. These new paradigms to narrate and negotiate the complexity of current times set forth a performative counter-discourse that relies on language and moving images along with a broader involvement that includes writers, current migrants or descendants of earlier migrants, intellectuals, and common people whose actions and thinking are characterised by both questioning the past and challenging the present. In so doing, this diversified, authorial community envisages and anticipates a better and more just future, while simultaneously reshaping and expanding the Anglophone postcolonial literary canon. Warsan Shire's works, especially the poem "Home", focus on migrants' journey and the reasons compelling them to leave their country of origin; 28 Tales for 28 Days brings awareness to the United Kingdom government's policy of indefinite detention of migrants by producing web-video first-hand accounts of refugees' experiences read by well-known artists. The Internet thus becomes a collective space where feelings of uprootedness, homelessness, and personal fragmentation find artistic expression.